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In late July, This American Life aired an episode titled "When Patents Attack!" that reported on some of the problems that software patents cause developers and businesses. It introduced the subject to new audiences in a compelling way, so we wrote to them to thank them for their excellent reporting.

The WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative enables the web community to further support the WebM Project. Google, Matroska and the Xiph.Org Foundation make the various components of WebM openly available on royalty-free terms. By joining the CCL, member organizations likewise agree to license patents they may have that are essential to WebM technologies to other members of the CCL.

For a while now author has tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free and open standard according to included definition. Here is a short writeup of what he has been able to gather so far. He brought up the topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list in July 2009, for those that want to see some background information.

Sighttpd is an HTTP streaming server designed for distributing realtime input. It is particularly useful for making camera streams available to multiple clients, and has been designed for embedded systems use. This release adds a module for streaming Ogg Vorbis from standard input.

Recently I have started to mess around with the Vorbis audio codec, commonly found within the Ogg media container. Unlike Theora, which I had also experimented with but won’t post the results for fear of a backlash, I must say I am rather impressed with Vorbis.

"A new IETF working group has been formed in the Real-time Applications and Infrastructure Area [...] The goal of this working group is to ensure the existence of a single high-quality audio codec that is optimized for use over the Internet and that can be widely implemented and easily distributed among application developers, service operators, and end users. At present it appears

This whole html tag ordeal is getting out of hand. If we look at the image tag it supports jpeg, png, gif and probably more although I've not tried any others. I wonder how drastic that decision must have been when made ? But seriously as it is now if I don't have the correct plugin both opera & firefox help out if possible.

"Dailymotion is excited to launch a new R&D platform dedicated to free video formats and web standards: openvideo.dailymotion.com. You don’t need the Adobe Flash plugin to watch videos on this platform - the only requirement is the latest version of Firefox, 3.5 beta, available here..."

"As part of the Mozilla development grant Timothy in collaboration with other xiph hackers has been hard at work on improving the theora encoder. I am happy to share an updated report that Monty has put together..." -- Start here: http://playogg.org/

"...We must continue to put pressure on Apple. That means continuing to boycott all DRM-content on iTunes, including the iPhone and the App Store. We encourage Apple to continue to remove DRM from iTunes content, including all movies, TV shows, games, audiobooks and applications, as well as support for free formats, such as Vorbis and Theora..."

"The recent launch of Stephen Fry's film in celebration of GNU's 25th anniversary has been a success on a number of levels — including for PlayOgg.org , the campaign for free audio and video formats. Worldwide, people have reached out to thank us and offer their support, including dozens of volunteers who have translated the film into over 24 languages.